The present invention relates to the field of user interfaces. More specifically, one embodiment of the invention provides an improved user interface for use by a health care provider in maintaining and viewing information from an electronic medical record.
Health information technology expenditures were estimated to be over $8.5 billion in 1994. Most of these expenses were for financial and administrative systems in hospitals, ancillary department systems, claims processing, and physician office practice management systems. Despite the desirability of integrating multiple systems through a electronic medical record (EMR), there has been only limited and isolated success in automating the most basic and essential clinical function, the physician's chart. With a clear need for rapid and efficient information processing, and a mandate to measure and improve health outcomes, the usefulness of a computerized patient record, based around a physician-accepted clinical workstation, is considerable.
The need for an EMR, while apparent, has heretofore met with great opposition from physicians and lack of success on the part of EMR system vendors. Although the EMR is widely discussed and touted as a near-term certainty, until physicians utilize a workstation as their primary mode of clinical communication, for both display and input, the full potential of the EMR will not be realized. Unfortunately, few physicians are willing to substitute a computer for their current dictated or manual records because they are too cumbersome to use. Consequently, health care organizations cannot get their physicians to use computers for their daily activities of reviewing and collecting patient information. Even where organizations have been successful in introducing computers into physician-patient interactions (often through heroic efforts), the goals of these systems have not been directed toward solving both the physicians' need for better clinical information and the organization's need to change physician practice patterns.
Therefore, what is needed is an easy-to-use and intuitive interface for quickly providing relevant information to a health care provider and filtering out the irrelevant information until it is needed.